Friday, February 10, 2006

Metal Discourse

It is well known that metal bands have a penchant for exploring the themes that haunt the male adolescent: medieval warfare, science fiction dystopia, black magic, getting laid, rocking harder than anyone else, etc. Also, the particular literary references in metal almost always point back to the books we read in high school:

This post is about a stranger pattern. Heavy metal bands (two of them British!) singing heroic and epic songs about...Native Americans. Just to make it completely insane, two of these tracks are sung from the Native perspective, as in Freddie Mercury singing things like:

"White man White manOur country was green and all our rivers wideWhite man White manYou came with a gun and soon our children died"

2 Comments:

I can't believe you posted Manowar. That's awesome. I saw them in a club called "The Thirsty Whale" outside of Chicago in the late 1980s. They seemed utterly oblivious to the fact that they looked, acted and sounded (well, sorta) exactly like Spinal Tap. I wish I were still naive enough not to be aware of such things.

As far as native American-themed metal songs go. Don't forget "Indians" by Anthrax. And I think that God-awful band Europe had one, too.